


a tender curiosity

by loveandthetruth



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Melancholy, Platonic Sex, Post-Game(s), survivor bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-15 23:50:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8078530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveandthetruth/pseuds/loveandthetruth
Summary: “Corvo.” She lifts her head to look at him. “Do you think we’re ever going to be all right?”





	

The air is heavy with steam and he can almost taste salts on his tongue. Thanks to Sokolov’s improvements the water is always hot, even so Corvo doesn’t expect to see anyone in the baths in the small hours of the morning, so finding Callista here is a surprise. Hearing his soft steps on the stone floor, she starts a little and turns.

“I’m sorry," he says, hanging back, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Callista curls herself down a little deeper into the water but doesn’t relax. “I didn’t think anyone would come here.”

“I know the feeling.” There’s a heavy pause. “I’ll go.”

His hand is on the door when she calls out to him. “Wait. There’s…plenty of space. You needn’t leave on my account.”

She keeps carefully turned away while he removes his night clothes and steps into the water, moving until he can sit opposite her corner of the square pool, twice an armslength away. They sit for a while, the silence not entirely comfortable but bearable.

Corvo tips his head back, eyes closed, his body starting to go slack and sleepy in the hot water. Between the months in prison and the long nights dispensing justice to traitors, rest had become an elusive and fickle beast. Corvo finally breaks the silence. “Been here long?”

“No.” She shifts and folds her arms, embarrassed. The water laps at the stone of the bath and the sound dredges up the memory of drifting though the waterfront, half dead. “I come here when I can’t sleep.”

He opens his eyes just enough to be able to see her. The way her body curls inward makes her collarbones especially pronounced and Corvo struggles to remember if she had always seemed so thin to him. He is, buried under his exhaustion, faintly but genuinely concerned. “Are you alright?”

Callista sighs and sweeps her fingers over the surface of the water, sending ripples towards him. Corvo can sense that she is caught between spilling her heart to him and the futility of doing so. Saying it out loud wouldn’t change anything. The world had turned upside down and been righted almost as if nothing had happened but she had been scarred just as deeply as he had and those wounds will ache for a long time to come. Forgetting would be difficult.

When she looks up, her face is utterly blank. It feels somehow painful to hold her gaze but Corvo can’t make himself look away. He extends a hand to her. “Tell me.”

The water isn’t quite so deep as to cover her breasts but Corvo’s eyes are instead drawn to the way the electric lamp on the floor – brought with her, the tower hasn’t been so much renovated that Corvo couldn’t find his way in the dark – cast a sharp shadow in the hollow of her neck. This close Corvo can see that she _has_ lost weight. When she puts her hand in his, he slides his grasp up around her wrist and is disappointed to find that he can close his fist around it so easily. It drives another sick stab of worry and guilt in his ribs.

He turns her and tugs her gently back against his chest. “Tell me,” he says.

“Do you miss her?”

His hands freeze on her arms. There’s no sound beside their breathing. The world suddenly seems too quiet, too still, too empty. “Every day.”

“Tell me,” she says.

The words come reluctantly, sticking in his throat. “There are…too many memories here. She should be here. For Emily. For me. For all of us.” He doesn’t know what else to say. There’s a clockwork heart in a locked box in the royal vault and a key around his neck. He’d thought about throwing it into the sea, but couldn’t bear the idea of giving it back to the Outsider. He’d thought about burying it with her, but he was afraid he’d only dig it back up. He was afraid to let it go as much as he was afraid to keep it.

They sit for a while in silence. Corvo’s hands taking up an absent stroke of her arms and her body relaxes against him. It feels good, the simple intimacy of it. He wonders how lonely she has been, if she, like him, had put those feelings away as if they belonged to someone else. “ _Callista._ ”

She sucks in a ragged breath and the words tumble out of her in a rush. “I don’t _belong_ here. I’m only here because Emily insisted. I’m not even a real governess. The way they look at me…at all three of us.”

“The only thing that matters is that Emily trusts you,” he says, then adds, in case it was ever in question, “and so do I.”

“I wish I…could’ve gone away from Dunwall.”

“With Samuel?” She tenses a little against him. “You love him.”

“No,” she says, too quick, then, “Maybe a little. It's not _love_. It’s just that he reminds me so much of the sea. I wish I could just sail away. I feel so trapped here, but I can’t leave Emily. I feel like the two of us are the only people in this whole wretched place who care about her at all.”

She covers her face with her hands then, fighting down a sob, and Corvo drops his mouth to the curve of her shoulder, his arms wrapping tight around her. It’s a small, instinctive gesture meant to comfort. He doesn’t think anything more of it, or anything, until he feels her turning in the circle of his arms to embrace him fully and tuck her face into his shoulder. It feels like a dream, almost unreal; a warm simple moment in the wake of so much suffering. “Don’t you ever want to leave?”

He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t know where to go. All I have left is here.”

“Corvo.” She lifts her head to look at him. “Do you think we’re ever going to be all right?”

It’s not a question he has an answer to. He wants to hope, but to say it out loud feels like too much of a burden to carry, one responsibility more than he could bear.

Before he can think of an honest reply, she’s leaned forward to put her mouth on his. It’s been a long time, and for one painful moment all he can think about is that he didn’t have a chance to kiss Jessamine when he came home, before the shadow of her retreats and all that’s left is Callista, alive in his arms. He doesn’t think of Jessamine again. He doesn’t think much of anything except the way her body against his demands his presence in this moment in a way he hasn’t been in a long time. His days in prison had eroded him and his thirst for justice – or vengeance – after had burned away whatever had remained, reducing him to an empty husk of a person wandering Dunwall Tower.

He pulls back a little to look at her, wondering. When he brushes the back of his fingers across her cheek she shivers a little, almost a flinch, as if she wasn’t expecting tenderness. He doesn’t take it personally. Tenderness is so hard to come by these days, sometimes it feels as though it hardly ever existed.

He doesn’t _want_ her but she’s here, warm and reassuringly solid. He kisses her thoroughly, but without any urgency, his desire for her remaining stubbornly cold. She presses heavily against him, drags her hands down between them. “Corvo?”

He shifts forward a little so she can get her knees up on the bench and draws an arm across her back, holding her tight against him while she rocks against his thigh. She relaxes fully against him finally, with a small sigh.

It feels strange, he thinks, sucking gently at the inside of her wrist, to be here with her and for this to be so empty of love or even passion, fuelled only by loneliness and mutual understanding. He presses his teeth into her skin and she makes a low needy sound, grinds down hard. It will be covered by her shirt cuff, but they’ll both know that the mark is there, a reminder that this happened, that it was real.

Holding her against him, he turns them both and sets her down on the edge of the bath. If the polished stone is cold after the heat of the water she doesn’t seem to notice, her arms tight around his shoulders as she blindly finds his mouth. He strokes himself once, twice, grows hard surprisingly easily. Whatever he feels for her, the lukewarm roll in his belly that he can’t put a name to, is enough for this. Her hands slip down his back to clutch at his hips and draw her to him. A groan scratches out of his throat when he settles into her, a small spark of desire finally catching, when she breathes, “ _yes_.”

He watches her through half lidded eyes as they set an easy rhythm together, the way her mouth falls open, her breath coming in short gasps, her legs coming up around his waist, her tongue slick against his, her thighs tightening every time he strokes into her, her hand tight in his hair, the other between their joined bodies where he can feel her knuckles pressing against him while she hurries herself to orgasm, dragging him along in the undertow.

They cling to each other for a long time, rebuilding their careful composure, withdrawing under their own masks. He dips his head for a kiss and tries not to feel hurt when she is the first to pull away.

“The sun will be up soon,” she says and kisses him once more, a last time, and makes to stand.

He catches her wrist. “Are you…are you alright?”

Her lips quirk a little, bittersweet. “Are you?”

There’s a heaviness in his chest when he breathes, but he makes himself believe. “I will be.”

“Then so will I.” She brushes the back of her fingers against his cheek and Corvo watches her go, wrapping a robe around herself and taking the lamp, leaving him with the sound of water and the growing half-light of dawn.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> "I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity" - F Scott Fitzgerald


End file.
